All That You Can't Leave Behind
by Dwimordene
Summary: 2007 movie 'Home' leaves its mark on everyone in unexpected ways, even on four newly homeless Autobots. A series of post Mission City vignettes. Ironhide, Ratchet, Bumblebee, and Optimus. Jazz didn't live to be homeless, but he gets the prequel chapter.
1. Hystery

**"Hystery"**

It was a whispery, watery little place.

That had been Jazz's first impression of the tiny blue-green world that Bumblebee had called them to – a planet so far out on the fringes of galactic space that its star hadn't even been dignified with so much as a number on any star map that Jazz had ever seen or downloaded, whether Cybertronian or otherwise. No need, then, to match up the natives' –_ humanity's_ – name for their world to anything already existing in the Cybertronian registers: its name was announced straightforwardly, no filters in between: _Earth_.

Of course, being Jazz, he had immediately followed up Bumblebee's linguistic links anyway and begun putting words into constellations that would sing sense for him: _Earth. Soil. Dirt. Ground_.

_Ground._ Humanity had named their planet for its upholding, with all the firmness and supportiveness, centrality, encompassingness, breadth and depth that that implied.

It was a whispery, watery, fragile, swirling little planet, whose radio and telecommunications were so 'quiet' as to seem unsure of themselves to Cybertronian sensibilities — and it was _terra firma, _base, solidity, ground. It was unfair to wonder whether its inhabitants, in settling on this name, were compensating for an intuition of just how delicate, how close to dissolution their world stood. Jazz had driven too many strange roads to let his own view get mixed into the views of others like that.

Besides, it was a matter of principle – there was a difference between a certain gloriously unpredictable collision of worlds and the submergence of them into a thick, smeared confusion, like a spread of warped mirrors.

Still: small watery world – vast _terra firma._ Inconstancy and ground. He supposed he must have seen dozens of such worlds, home to an amazing diversity of wetware life that embodied for him the same perceptual paradox, yet for some reason it struck him. Quietly, as was the wont of this world, but it had struck him. So many species that he'd met had looked up at the sky to draw the name of their world, or to an _around_ness, or to something else on the world's surface that they desired or needed. This species, on its fragile (to him, to him!) world, had looked down and named its support: Earth. _Ground._ It was an idiosyncrasy that was not without its charm.

But maybe it had touched deeper than he'd thought, and drawn something to the surface – old pieces of himself.

Generally, Jazz didn't worry about forgetting himself – he might once have tried, but he'd found that the past haunted, and besides, he couldn't afford the habit of ignorance in his line of work. Every so often, it was true, something would erupt into the forefront of consciousness that had managed to creep up on him, and then he might have a bad moment or several.

But of necessity, beyond even the necessity of his work, he'd had to find a way of dealing with remembrance. And what troubled wasn't even the remembrance that most might imagine it would be: people expected that the officer who'd come to be Prime's first lieutenant, who'd come up through special ops from the beginning, and been with Optimus since before he'd been Optimus, would wrestle with the destiny and deeds to which his task delivered him. And it wasn't that he didn't struggle with that – he did, he had to. But he could own his deeds, at least; and he'd chosen to be special ops because he was, frankly, good at it and he wasn't one to back down from its intensity.

What haunted him in all its innocence was the destiny he hadn't been able to own.

Like most Cybertronians, whether Autobot or Decepticon, he'd never fought in his original form. By the time the shooting had started (which had been well after he'd gotten himself squarely into the middle of what would become the war in Kaon), he'd been modified, but not just by a simple gun installation or other weaponry mounts. He'd outgraded more than once before he'd ever gotten a gun installed, changing models with a frequency that would've seemed suspicious had anyone beyond his benefactors known of it.

And suspicion would've been warranted, because it'd been an illegal set of outgrades, done through the back-alley 'body-snatchers', who, operating under the radar of the medical establishment, had snatched parts, and sometimes nearly complete shells from the 'fritz-bin' before they were sent to the smelting pits for recycling. Not every model and part that they managed to scavenge was usable for anything but subcomponents, but some of them were, particularly discards from other outgrades or upgrades, and so piece by piece, they could build a shell capable of sustaining life.

Had Jazz had any other way out of himself and his cohort than such amateur operations, he would've taken it, but on pre-war Cybertron, the law had been clear: a cohort worked, a cohort made its members to be what they needed to be; everyone had a place, and no one could not have a place. Thus if no one could be 'discarded' and left without the work he'd been made for, the correlate was that a cohort had a claim on its members that could not be simply overridden by an individual's discontent. And if sometimes a cohort agreed to relinquish that claim on one of its members, so that the 'changer' could be outgraded _provided _that there was another cohort to take him, every changer Jazz had ever heard tell of had been a transport. And as rare as changers had been, even more rare had been the transports who hadn't changed to other transport shells but had gone to structure shells.

The reverse outgrade, from structure to transport, had been unheard of before the war. So far as Jazz knew, he was the only one who had ever done it, because structure cohorts were not like transport or mixed cohorts. They were gestalt minds, grounded in each other, one with each other and with the flows they tracked and manipulated: telecom data, power lines and generator hubs, space-lane traffic, geological flows. As in mind, so in body: they fit together in fields precisely organized for their tasks; or they might interlock with each other to form larger structures, either in a modular fashion or so that _organa_ shared vital parts. Temporary detachment from that whole was possible in some cases, depending on how the physical whole fit together. 'Localization' was possible for every gestalt and _organon_, even on the job, as attention focused on some contact from the outside, somewhere on the collective body. But permanent detachment of an_ organon? _No gestalt would consent to such a voluntary amputation – prior to the war, it'd been thought that no gestalt _could_.

That had turned out to be incorrect, but structures who had survived the destruction of their cities and detached permanently were... not the same. They couldn't be – a structure without ground was a structure at loose ends, but an _organon_ without a gestalt? That was a contradiction – it didn't make sense. It more than didn't make sense, it deformed: it cut sense from ground and for a structure... well, that changed everything.

And that was exactly what Jazz had been counting on when he'd outgraded. As to why...

Before the war, neuropsychologists had been divided over whether the minds of individual structures survived in the gestalt merge or not. That individual_ organa_ retained memory of other times when they had detached had been well-known. It was what happened in the meantime, and the relationship between gestalt and detached_ organon, _that had been the subject of controversy: was a gestalt merge a coordination of the individual minds into a totality in which individual _organa_ retained some form of self-awareness? Or was it more radical than that? From without of the gestalt merge and its task, whatever it might be, the evidence had been inconclusive, yet if once a transport outgraded to fully participate in that merge, if once the gestalt accepted him, there was no 'returning' with reports. Such a one, if there were such a one, did not _make_ report, he _was _the very stuff of reports, every word of him.

For _organa _like Jazz, on pre-war Cybertron, had had a way of speaking that differed from the way transports spoke: they had trouble with singulars – some didn't use them, some would wander in and out of 'I', 'we', and 'they', apparently without ever noticing or tripping over the difference. Some wouldn't use pronouns at all, and wouldn't discriminate verb conjugations the way transports or even other structures would. Did that mean that they had some sense of themselves that tended towards the plural, indicating a sense of numerical difference-in-unity? Or were their pronoun usage patterns – or lack thereof – simply a linguistic effect that corresponded to nothing but the necessities of Cybertronian?

And then there was the 'inside'/'outside' issue. Cybertronian, unlike most other languages on record, was rich in terms that clustered around that duality. Naturally so, for primary, robotic form didn't make for a clean cut between 'interior' and 'exterior': the armor plating that was the outermost layer of Cybertronian anatomy didn't cover everything, and basic structure often was exposed between 'more outside' layers of body matter. Consequently, a variety of terms existed for describing degrees of interiority and exteriority in the absence of an actual, continuous surface to mark off definitively what was 'inside' and what was 'outside'.

Structures were more closed off more often than transports, because alt-modes in general were bounded by a continuous armored surface. This was especially true of structural 'alt-modes,' in which structures spent most of their time, assuming their task permitted them physically to detach and take a robotic mode in any case. Despite this, structures, more than any other group of Cybertronians, tended to use the 'middle' terms that lay between the fixed and abstract concepts of 'interiority' and 'exteriority'. They even used the middle terms to use to describe something wandering through or around a group of themselves, even when they were not merged with their brethren. Such habits, which appeared to defy the logic of the body reflected in language, just rendered the question of whether _organa _structures had a sense of discrete bounds at the _organa _level within the gestalt, or not, more perplexing.

One might have imagined that to solve the mystery, one had only to pose such questions to _organa_ structures who were equipped to merge. But it was not nearly so simple, because fundamentally, it wasn't a matter to be explained. It wasn't a question to be answered. It was a phenomenon to be lived. Jazz had lived it for uncounted years, and for too many of them he'd lived it as a kind of disjointed dying that he couldn't have done with.

For like all structures who detached for a time from their cohort's gestalt mind, Jazz would come to himself, when he came to himself, fundamentally disoriented. It wasn't that the contrast between the gestalt perspective and his singular one had been so vast that it left him reeling and confused. It was that he'd had no contrast – he was simply _there_ at a certain point, as if he'd taken up where he'd left off hours or days or weeks earlier.

And in those times between detachments? the curious might ask.

That… that was where the confusion truly began. In that time between detachments were events – events that he _did_ know of (sometimes) once detached. But they were not memories. A memory was something one had lived through. It was an event that took the form of a 'mine' or a 'to me'. What stretched in skips and leaps between his memories seemed more like a story he'd heard somewhere-he-couldn't-recall-where, one that told of things that had happened to someone he knew. But he couldn't make the story his. It was remote, existed in a kind of perpetual and unbreachable third person. Despite all trying, he could only look at it, not enter into it. It resisted every effort to put it into his perspective.

Even worse, however, was the inverse phenomenon. As opposed to the distant thinness of the story-memory-not-memory, there was the inescapable thickness of a wordless body-memory. The body he woke to in detachment was filled with strange aches and odd delights that confused and bewildered, because if he could not help but feel them, he remembered nothing of how he'd come by them. There, where he was most sunk in himself, in the dumbness of his body, he was utterly incapable of recalling if it'd been_ he_ who'd earned its pains or learned its enjoyments, or if he felt someone else's hurts and pleasures. Heavy with strangeness, freighted with a thick smearing of mind – singular, plural, both and neither – and metal, he lived inhabited by little habits and twitches: the half-aborted impulses of he knew-not-whom. And like most _organa _structures, he wouldn't have been terribly surprised if a limb had unexpectedly transformed because to be a structure was to be "susceptible to the influence of air and earth," as one poet had put it.

One might have thought that the "story" might help, that the story-not-memory in its distance would bring perspective, put a stop to the reeling. But it did nothing to tame such anarchy: even if he could on occasion deduce a causal link between one of its events and body-memory, the two were fundamentally irreconcilable. Deduction could sometimes coordinate them but coordination preserved their essential difference,for how could something as intimate as what _he_ felt be made to belong to an event_ he_ couldn't grasp as _his_?

If he could've believed, as he'd known other structures had, that that disorientation and confusion were the signs of the deficiency of a detached state, and so the solution was simply _not to detach often or for long, _it might've been bearable. If his horror of that disoriented confusion had been the result of a malfunction, he could've hoped for repair. For a long time, in fact, he had hoped to find that he was malfunctioning. He'd gone back again and again to the medics, claiming that there was something wrong, and again and again, the diagnosis had come back clean. He'd tried insisting – there _had_ to be something wrong if he felt this way. But the experience itself was not uncommon. Or at least, what he was saying – what he was_ able_ to say – sounded no different from what other detached structures would say, and _they_ happily returned to merge back into the gestalt. No one seemed able to grasp why he should be so radically discontent with the same solution, if there were nothing medically wrong.

Jazz himself at the time hadn't thought any differently from the medics, or he'd not have kept searching for a problem that admitted of repair. It had been a long, slow, agonizing road to self-clarity, but at a certain point, he'd come to accept what he was being told: that there _wasn't _anything wrong with him. And with that acceptance had come the startling realization: if there wasn't anything wrong with him, then that meant that he didn't _want _to be fixed. What he wanted was to be _saved_. And salvation was escape from the gestalt merge, whatever the cost.

But the path to salvation had been barred by a law that, as he'd discovered, embodied the incomprehension of others. The medics who had been perplexed by him before had been horrified that he now seemed to be requesting their participation in a gross violation – for permanent detachment would injure the gestalt and its _organa_ as surely as the death of an _organon. _

Even presuming permission were granted, no one knew what that would result in – transport-to-structure conversions were difficult, and success was hard to assess. The gestalt's stability was about the only measure anyone had, given the difficulty of communicating with _organa. _Would a permanently detached structure be stable enough to fill the role required of him in another cohort? No one knew. The only certain thing was that the gestalt mind opposed any such alteration, as did individual _organa _so far as could be ascertained, thus the medics could find 'no good reason' to support his request to outgrade and quite evidently they never would.

So he'd thought, at least, and nearly despaired, until one day, after the latest refusal of his plea to change, one of the junior medics had drawn him aside and virused him.

"Just something to keep you quiet, and to keep a bit of you quiet from the gestalt – under the radar, even in the merge," the 'bot had assured him. "Little something I figured out. We're going to take a walk – I've some friends you should meet."

That had been his induction into the underground economy of frustrated would-be changers – 'bots who couldn't outgrade, couldn't change cohorts, but couldn't simply do nothing, either. Among them had been some would-be medics, and a few medics who'd been would-be something others as well... and who'd been willing to try to cut him free, if he'd run the risk. By then, they'd hardly had to ask – he'd taken the offer without a second thought.

He'd still had to wait a year before the attempt could even be made. But the year up, they'd made good on their promise. And ever afterwards he'd relied on the trade-in-kind and hospitality of such clandestine groups for fellowship and survival, because a 'bot without a cohort was a 'bot without society – without work or purpose, and so without easy means of addressing his needs, whether physical or social.

It'd been tens of thousands of years since he'd made the shift, turned transport, and buried all record of what and who he'd been behind a labyrinth of false files and profiles. With Cybertron destroyed, it was likely now that he alone could betray himself. Not that it mattered anymore, of course – even if someone tumbled to him, it was not as if he would have any cause to think anything but that Jazz must've outgraded at some point after the war had begun, as many other structures had. Even if suspicion had been roused, by now it was unlikely anyone would care about pre-war scandal and outlawry. And that was fortunate, because although he might have fooled Optronix for awhile, he was almost certain that Optimus knew. For that matter, Ratchet had figured him out very early on.

But it was highly unlikely that anyone else would. It was unlikely, because most would look at his person and at his behavior and find absolutely nothing structural about either. Granted, he wouldn't be thought a typical transport, either, but eccentricity was on his side when it came to disguising his origins. The unexplored, the uncontrolled, conflict, messiness, speed, chaos – he thrived on such, which was in part what made him so effective as a special ops agent. On the more whimsical and bizarre side, he was infamous for cheerfully showing up back on base from his off-shifts with a coating of mud or dust or damp or muck that covered him inside and out, courtesy of off-road explorations, and soaked in the scent of whatever he'd passed through. And small though he might be now, he moved like few could, whether in war or out of it.

Even his more civilized pursuits evinced a certain willingness to, as it were, 'roll in it.' He would sink down into languages and music without a second thought, and for weeks and months blissfully revel in warping the minds of friends with strange new concepts and offending their sensibilities with new sounds.

It was hard to see anything structural in any of that. Other 'bots didn't see in his enthusiasm a structure's total dedication of self to function. They didn't see the drive to merge with the situation, to take it all in, process it in and through himself, put everything in order. They didn't see in his verbal agility and love of languages the drive to master what he had struggled with for so much of his life. In his willing descent into the grit and scent and wet of a world's wild places or grimy back-alleys, and into chancy, dangerous situations, no one remarked the quiet, joyful satisfaction of someone who, in his explorations, no longer need fear the things of the world, but could immerse himself in them and feel that immersion as a descent into self rather than a being-dissolved in the foreign.

And they didn't see either, on the other side of joy, the formless horror that, despite shell-swaps and years between him and that last merge, still assaulted him at times. Things lost their definition then, felt like one spreading, invasive mass threatening to engulf and submerge him, and he had to hold onto himself and just endure it. If he could afford to do it, then he would settle somewhere by himself and shut down every comm line and scanner he had and just _be there._ Because transport though he was now, when matters tilted suddenly into the overwhelming and the unbearable, primitive structural impulse relied first and last on the return to ground, made of the relation to base something intimate without words that underlay even the gestalt.

Earth was ground for humanity. And though no Autobot had ever thought to come here, it'd become their ground as well – maybe their last. All their hopes and fears had come to rest on this little patch of solar dust he'd not expected to like so well so soon. Funny, fragile place that nevertheless reminded foreign visitors of its standing – or that it was a place to stand.

They'd lost a lot of worlds to get to this point, and their own not least. Maybe Jazz felt that loss more deeply than others – maybe he felt the urgency of the appeal of a world called 'Earth' a little more personally, in a way. He would never know.

What he knew was the roar of engines, and Ratchet shouting warning: "It's Megatron – retreat!" A quick glance left showed an alley he could dive for, but the earth had quaked, and then a shadow fell over him, even as Ratchet snapped again: "Move! Fall back!"

And he would have, but he could feel the others at his back: Lennox's men, still too close and dithering over lost ground, and Ratchet among them. Ratchet, who was a thin-plated medical transport and not the one to stand... _No. _

So he'd held a moment, intending to break for cover as soon as the others were just far enough from harm. Just a moment he'd stood there, aware of Megatron bearing down on them, of the shiver of the earth before that relentless advance, of the broken glass and asphalt and heat shifting under his treads... One moment he'd stood. And then another. And then one more, because this was_ not_ going to be a route...

Numbing heat and a rush of static lit the air, made it tremble. Even as he'd staggered, the pain had slammed into him again, this time like a sun gone nova and the world could not endure. It heaved and cracked, and then the fire swept through and blew it to dust and heat. For one panicky, horrific instant, he was absolutely lost – free-falling and adrift without even a sense of 'this way up', and as time seemed to warp into eternity, he could feel himself thin out, armor plating going brittle from the scouring, dissolving into the chaos of that atomic dust...

And then suddenly, jarringly, he hit deck, and hard enough to make him groan, but he blessed that pain nonetheless. For the burn and shock of that impact told him where _he _was – told him _that _he was, and_ here, _as of themselves his claws worked gratefully into that shattered little ground. For a second he lay there, comm lines down and optics shuttered, with nothing but nothing in his head, just sensors opened onto earth and feeling: _Hereiamhere I am. __**Here. I. Am.**_

And here he would stay and stand. He didn't think it, but he knew it as a certainty that seared through him, wordless, swift, and visceral. It pulled him to his feet, where he paused a moment... and then turned around.

"Jazz, what are you _doing_?" Ratchet snarled, uncomprehending, desperation in every tone. A round of bullets shot past overhead, and Jazz watched Megatron flinch, then growl. "_Jazz!_"

_Sorry, doc_, he thought fleetingly. Then, lifting his face to his enemy's, he dug his heels into the earth...

* * *

**Author's notes: **This is what comes of mixing dissatisfaction with a cheap, cinematic death in with Levinas and strange ideas about sexual difference in Cybertronians. I would have added Jazz's vignette to the end, but it really doesn't fit there, especially considering that the rest of the series develops chronologically. Thanks to Witchtree for her patient beta-reading and suggestions! All the remaining flaws are mine.


	2. Gravity

**Gravity**

"Just hold still a minute so I don't lose an arm. That sensor relay's either corroded or – gotcha!" An engine purred softly with satisfaction, and Ironhide glanced to up to see Ratchet standing a little ways away, watching with approval as Mikaela, balanced somewhat precariously on Ironhide's shoulder, one arm plunged up to the elbow in the weapons specialist's pectoral structures, gave something a sharp push. She grunted, then gave another shove at whatever it was she had found.

"Something the matter?" Ratchet asked, approaching to take a look. Mikaela glanced up as well and withdrew her arm.

"Yeah, it's one of those secondary pistons – the pair of them that are closest to the ammo feeds," she replied. "One of them's not retracting all the way. The way he was describing it, I thought the feed sensor was on the fritz, but it's not. It's fine, it's just blocked from knowing it has to do anything. I can't push the piston back, though."

"Given the load it's designed to bear, hardly surprising," the medic replied, flicking his lights on as he leaned over Ironhide, running a quick scan that sent a shivery tingle through his neural circuitry. "Have you gone in through the telemetry sensors?"

As Ratchet and Mikaela fell to affable chatting over his systems, Ironhide's vents flared – the long-suffering sigh of the, well, long-suffering. But he knew the drill, and while he wasn't above giving Ratchet a bit of grief as a patient, it was understood that when Mikaela was the medic on deck, best behavior was mandatory. The aftermath of Mission City had proved the human girl to be unexpectedly proficient with machinery, and more importantly, to be able to handle Ratchet in his own element. But she was still human. Ironhide therefore kept absolutely still and silent, lest he distract the girl at some crucial moment or accidentally dislodge her from her perch on his chassis. For should she come to any avoidable harm while she was rooting about in his insides, Ratchet would unleash a tirade that would absolutely blister paint. Ironhide's paint, to be precise, and he'd be lucky if the medic didn't burn out his audio system with his swearing while he was at it.

All that aside from the fact that Ironhide, having come to appreciate just how appallingly fragile their human friends were, would never forgive himself if Mikaela lost a hand or were seriously injured while trying to do him a favor. Much as he and the others appreciated the fact that with her about, parts suffering from the inevitable wear and tear of a long, hard tour of duty with no repair bay in sight could be accessed and fixed with far less intrusive procedures just thanks to her size, Ironhide at least found himself preferring Ratchet. Not that he minded being worked on by an apprentice – if she was good enough for Ratchet, then she was more than good enough for Ironhide.

But though Ratchet might have to crack armor and pull whole motor units to get at stressed and injured parts, while Mikaela could just reach inside, worrying about Mikaela's safety made the whole procedure far harder to bear than the inconvenience and discomfort of being Ratchet's patient. Better a little pain than a lot of worry, and if there were one thing Ironhide was built to withstand, it was a little pain.

He thought about that a lot lately. Two months since Mission City, and they were only just beginning to settle in. They had a base, at least – an old set of hangars out past the borders of Tranquility, and inland, away from the sea and its corrosive salty air. It wasn't Cybertron, but it was a geologically active area, with high winds. 'Bee had conscripted him and Ratchet both to put in geothermal taps for power and their resident expert on generators was busily churning out plans to take advantage of the wind without being too obvious as to their presence, since Optimus was still dealing with a political arena that was less than stable, and which threatened to grow even more unstable thanks to their own arrival.

But though Ironhide was impatient for a resolution, and one that would get human guns pointed skyward and scanning for Decepticon signals, he was largely satisfied to leave all such business to Prime, whose concern it properly was. For himself, he was content to keep to the ready and he was not adverse to talking readiness with people like Will Lennox or Bobby Epps, or some of their superiors and anyone else whom Prime had asked him to speak with where it was a matter of training or weaponry. Ironhide wasn't Wheeljack, but he knew his way around guns of all sorts, and he was willing to share what knowledge he had so long as Prime cleared it. More than willing, actually, especially if such encounters ended in a training exercise, much to Ratchet's dismay.

"Haven't you been shot at enough recently without doing live ammo exercises where it's you against the entire human army?" the medic would demand.

"It's not the entire army, it's just one base. Not to mention, I'm doing you a favor," Ironhide would reply, and fix Ratchet with a look. "Even you have to practice."

That tended to get him an exasperated flare of vents and a few good curses before Ratchet chased him out with the parting admonition that if he got himself slagged, he could fragging well remember this conversation and suffer in silence while Ratchet worked on him without waiting for anesthetic coding to take effect.

What most people probably did not realize was that Ironhide was not unhappy with the idea of suffering a bit, even under Ratchet's scalpel. That in fact, he'd be happy enough to forgo Ratchet's coding cocktail – "codeine cocktail," Mikaela called it, playing on words – entirely. Who needed local anesthesia when almost everything about this planet was numbing? With the exception of those few hours in the sun or at night, dodging friendly fire, feeling the scrape and burn of tarmac and earth, or the percussive sting of bullets and flares or cryofreeze chemicals, life on Earth left him feeling strangely adrift, floating free, so deep in the frictionless comfort of his skin that he fell out of the world. It was like Ratchet's coding. Like space travel. Like death.

It wasn't anyone's fault, particularly, it was just the way of things – Earth wasn't made for him, and he hadn't been made for Earth. He'd been made to bear up, under loads and pressure, and the voids he knew best were not the chill, airless depths of space that someone like Optimus had been built to work in as an orbital dockyard 'bot. The gaps Ironhide knew were the gaps that opened in a line under enemy fire.

That was where he belonged – in the breach. It was his place to hold so that others didn't have to, and he could take the bullets and the plasma and the missiles and the lasers, shrapnel and dirt because he just didn't feel it as intensely. Not that he didn't feel it at all, but it took more, and he could handle the hurt. He could bear it – he was built to bear it, it was what he was meant to do, and he wasn't ashamed of that. One took pride in doing one's work, whatever that work was.

Not every Autobot understood his particular work (for all they all shared in it now) or the sensibilities it bred in certain builds, but some did. Despite their different temperaments, there was a reason he had gotten on as well as he had with Jazz, for example – Jazz, for all his lighter build, his infinitely more vulnerable make, was another who liked to live life at a certain intensity just short of unbearable for others. Ironhide could respect that. He'd found that that tolerance opened them both out to the world.

He'd never imagined, therefore, that it could cut him off, close him in, put the world to one side – the outside – and leave him caught on the other. But things were so fragile here! They didn't stand up to him, didn't resist – he couldn't _feel_ them, not really, not until something broke. Cybertronians built things to last, to stand up to 'bots like Ironhide, who needed a certain friction, a certain weight and solidity to their world just to keep themselves grounded in it, heavy as their armor was, high as their pain thresholds were. That was the trade-off, Ratchet had explained once to Mikaela.

"We can cut off pain signals by raising the threshold to a greater or lesser degree, but it comes at a cost," Ratchet had explained, while showing her the ins and outs of 'Bee's and Ironhide's damaged systems after Mission City. "Cut off pain, or make it harder to raise, and you lose orientation. It is the same for all living beings; we feel in different ways, and at different intensities, but one cannot not feel at all."

Ratchet, of course, was a medic – it was his business to know such things. It was his job to know things about Cybertronian bodies that he would never himself experience, being built differently, and he seemed not unhappy to have ended on Earth. But Ironhide had watched his friend in their new home. He'd seen how Ratchet would trail fingers over plants, run a palm over walls, stretch casually to touch the ceiling or the underside of a bridge, crouch down to lean a hand briefly on the floor – literally to get a feel for the place through hands that could diagnose damage to hidden internal parts of his patients in some cases by feel alone.

That was likely why Ratchet never fought with Prime over assigning Ironhide those live-fire exercises, and why despite protests and complaints the medic always let Ironhide go in the end. It wasn't that the Autobots had less to fear from human weapons than their own – human weapons had shown themselves quite capable, when in the proper hands, of taking down a Cybertronian, and their safety modes were minimal. And it wasn't doubt that the army that had made Will and Bobby couldn't hand Ironhide his head on a platter eventually. It was not, in other words, complacency that silenced him. No. On some level, Ratchet had to know.

Standing there on the sidelines with the brass, rubbing his hands together as he waited on the outcome of such practice sessions and to learn whether his services would be needed, he couldn't_ not_ know why Ironhide needed to be on those excruciating testing grounds, which were so different from the empty fields surrounding their home base. 'Empty' fields, filled with life and the fragile work of who knew how many years of the planet's patient turning. No, it wasn't boredom that drove Ironhide, nor a taste for thrills; and it wasn't a death wish.

"How does that feel?" Ratchet would ask, when the gauntlet had been run and rerun, and he crouched by Ironhide, tweaking damaged or jammed gears, running a test current through injured circuits.

"Fine," Ironhide would answer painfully, with vast relief. "I can feel it just fine."

"Ironhide?" Mikaela's voice brought him out of his musings, and he shuttered his optics briefly, wiping memory from view. He followed her voice and found her perched on Ratchet's light mountings – he hadn't even realized she'd moved. And both she and Ratchet were looking expectantly at him.

"Yes?" he replied, after a moment. Mikaela gestured to his shoulder. "Piston's back in place – try it out," she suggested, and Ratchet nodded as well.

"All right." Obediently, he rose to his feet and gave a shrug, brought up targeting and raised his arm, ran through the motions: one-eighty on the vertical, ninety on the horizontal, no grinding of gears, no creaks, nothing. Just the smooth feel of well-worked parts and the electric tingle of weaponry. He dropped a couple of rounds in place – felt them slither, but no jams.

"Was that it, then?" Mikaela asked after a few moments of silence. "Did we fix it?"

"I believe so, yes," Ironhide replied, targeting a bird. He didn't fire, though, just watched it blink across his HUD until another icon blinked into view on an IFF squawk. A very familiar icon, and he quickly lowered his arm, powering weapons down as he sent an acknowledgment. "Sam and Bumblebee are back."

Mikaela sighed, just a little disappointed. "I'd better go grab my stuff – we've gotta get back home or we'll both be grounded." But then she smiled up at them, and said, "Thanks, guys, for letting me practice a little. I hope I didn't hurt you, Ironhide."

"No, not at all. Thank you," Ironhide replied, and Ratchet simply inclined his head and replied: "You did well. So get home on time so I don't have to postpone your next lesson for a month."

"Will do. See you!" With that, she turned and began heading for the far hangar. She'd made it about halfway before a yellow Camaro, trailing a dust wake and blaring its horn, swerved to halt directly in her path. A door was flung open, and Sam's cheerful greeting could be heard emanating from the interior as Mikaela ducked her head and climbed in. But she did lean out the window and wave at the pair of Autobots still standing silently in the middle of the field. Ratchet and Ironhide raised their hands in response, watching as Bumblebee's tires dug in, kicking up dirt and sand before launching him forward with his passengers towards the base.

"'Bee's happy here," Ironhide said after a few more minutes' silent staring.

"Mm," Ratchet replied, but no more than that. Not, at least, until the medic turned to face him, hands on his hips, and Ironhide could feel the scan.

"What?" he demanded. "Nothing. Just checking. Everything's in place – Mikaela did a good job with that piston."

"You're the one who got it back in."

"So I did. Let's see how well I really did then," Ratchet replied, taking a step back, as his battle mask snapped into place. Ironhide stared at him. Ratchet was challenging him to a fight?

"You serious?" he asked, after a second.

"Do you want do this or not?" Ratchet demanded, raising his hands. Ironhide remained as he was a long moment, but then a slow smile spread over his face.

"Sure, but not here. Hangar B – got a nice concrete floor..."

* * *

**Author's notes**: So the idea here is that there are certain kinds of things I want to look at that I can't fit into a regular narrative very easily, and I am lazy as well as busy. The aim is to do this story as a themed set of single-perspective vignettes that will let me play around a little more with imaginary anatomy and how that might intersect with the struggle to adapt to an irreversible exile on a planet that just isn't Cybertron or any of its colonies (assuming there were any – which I do assume). We'll see how it goes! This particular story can be seen as following "Bridges," though I tried to write it as a stand alone.

The title is, of course, a cheap rip off of U2's album.


	3. Resonance

**Resonance **

It was evening, and the setting sun made the distant silhouettes of skyscrapers waver darkly on the horizon. It was a sight to see, though most would see nothing but the glare. Ratchet, however, had his optics polarized. Standing outside of one of the converted hangars on the Autobots' home base outside of Tranquility, looking down from the plateau on which it stood, he watched as smaller pinpricks of light began to flicker on in neat rows – street lights reacting to the darkening of the day. From here, at this hour, Tranquility looked its name, as opposed to the busy, teeming bed of activity he knew it to be.

"See anything down there, doc?" a voice asked, and Ratchet did not need to turn to know who asked. Even had they not been alone on base, it was impossible not to recognize the man's voice, with its distinctive Spanish 'lilt' as humans said of it. '_Lilt_,' Ratchet thought, running the word around mouth and mind.

"Just the sun and the city," he answered after a moment, and since humans found it rude not to face the one you spoke to, he turned about to see Jorge Figueroa roll his wheelchair to a halt on the edge of the old tarmac.

The former Ranger squinted, raising a hand to shade his eyes, then shifted his gaze to look out over the rest of the orange-washed valley. He inhaled deeply, and his face broke out in a startlingly white grin. "Great view you got. Beats the one at the VA! You ever wanna get rich, you could sell the lot, you know? Gotta be a lotta people who'd want it."

"That assumes we are after wealth," Ratchet replied calmly, and gestured to the horizon once more. "One cannot buy a view."

"Tell it the developers, man," Figueroa retorted, but he did not seem inclined to argue the point. "So I guess they're not comin' in yet, huh?"

"Not yet. Ironhide and Bumblebee are very... enthusiastic. I am sure the cybernetics team will get plenty of data from this little exercise," Ratchet said wryly, hoping that this same exercise wouldn't end in a long night's repair session. Enthusiastic training was all well and good, but he knew those two, and especially Ironhide – they didn't pull their punches. Not much, anyway. Ratchet just hoped the damage would be such as he could yell over and then justifiably kick them out of his bay to let their bodies deal with the scrapes and dents on their own.

"You gettin' what _you_ need, doc?" Figueroa asked.

"Oh yes – very interesting, the bio-mechanical 'mesh' issue. I have never studied it before – it was never an issue for us, obviously, and this is the first time I have had any reason to take it up as a problem," Ratchet replied, and Figueroa grinned again, seeming pleased.

"We lead the way," he declared.

"I suppose so."

For a time, man and robot said nothing, just watched the night fall. They had met only a few weeks ago, when, after a string of dealings with government scientists whose areas of research in no way overlapped with Ratchet's, someone at the government level had apparently finally taken a look at the "résumé" Ratchet had submitted (at said government's request) when Optimus had handed him the job of fielding requests for scientific interaction.

"Why me?" Ratchet had asked at the time. "I'm a doctor, not Perceptor!"

"You may not be Perceptor, but you've seen the inside of a research lab, whereas the rest of us were maintenance technicians and architectural construction 'bots before the war," Optimus had replied. "I need someone to handle the scientific community here, and I have no one better qualified than you at this time."

Ratchet couldn't have argued with that, even if it hadn't been an order, and so he had contacted their liaison with the American government, informed her of his new status, and been told to please send in a "Cee-Vee."

"A... what?" he had asked.

"A C.V. A résumé – list of relevant jobs and experience," the woman on the other end of the com line had explained.

_Relevant jobs and experience._ Ratchet had considered his millennia of work in the medical field, and the size of the data file it would take to hold even a quarter of it, and after a moment had asked, in a tone he had hoped didn't betray his trepidation, "Will you accept an abbreviated account?"

Fortunately, the answer had been 'yes', and Ratchet had thought he had been clear enough as to what it was that he was prepared to handle. Apparently, however, he had not been, or else some preconceived notion of 'advanced alien species' was at work, because Ratchet had been scrambling ever since to find diplomatic ways of explaining that in the first place, faster rate of data absorption aside, he could not simply look at files and magically become an expert. There was a learning curve and advancement up that gradient took time and practice.

In the second, as he had been obliged to explain several times, Cybertronians just didn't need to farm for their food and so had no agriculturalists among them. They also didn't require certain other things that humans found vital – oxygen, for example, or water free of heavy metals. Moreover, very few Cybertronian worlds had any native non-mechanoid life forms on them, and while there were worlds whose population was a mixture of native biological species and Cybertronians, these were relatively rare. Certainly, he had never lived on one of them, and neither had any of his squad mates.

Thus when a research proposal had come in from a team of human medical researchers who were interested in cybernetics, he had been ready literally to open his spark to them. Had he thought such a gesture would mean anything to them at all, he likely would have. Regardless, he had been relieved, to say nothing of intrigued.

Nor he alone: Lennox and Epps, who had heard about the project through the Autobot grapevine (a.k.a., Bumblebee), had been intrigued as well. "Is it a live study? I mean, are you going to need test subjects?" Lennox had asked.

"There was a pending request for approval to use live subjects attached to the proposal, yes," Ratchet had said. At that, Epps and Lennox had exchanged a significant look.

"Think I know someone who could help you out in that regard," Lennox had said after a moment. "Have you got a number to those cyberneticists?"

And that was how Figueroa had come to be involved. As one of the few survivors of a direct assault by a Cybertronian, and one of an even smaller number of said survivors to require a prosthetic limb, he had been a perfect profile match: he already had the latest in prosthetic technology and was undergoing tests on other neurological damage; he knew about Cybertronians; and as a former Army Ranger, he and the few Sector Seven special forces casualties were on a short list for security clearances. He was also local, which made transportation simple enough – Lennox or Epps or some of his other former squad mates could go with Ironhide and pick him up from Tranquility's VA hospital in under an hour, traffic permitting.

Despite his interest, Ratchet had been a little worried about dealing directly with human patients at first – he might be one of Cybertron's better doctors, but he had had no idea what to expect from a human who had lost a limb. Such things happened regularly to Autobots, but so long as they had the spare parts and fabrication or repair capacity, it was only a matter of time before the 'bot in question was back on the field. Humans, though, seemed less likely to take such things in stride.

But Figueroa had proved to be easy to work with – unlike some 'bots Ratchet knew (and whose names began with "I" and "B", just for starters), he was a cooperative patient and did as he was told. And he seemed remarkably cheerful despite his loss.

"_Mas se perdio en Cuba_," Figueroa had said, when Ratchet had cautiously (and under suitably medical pretext) inquired as to how he felt about it all. "I ain't dead, doc. In my job, that ain't nothin'!"

Indeed, it wasn't, as Ratchet well knew, looking up at the darkening sky and thinking of home.

"So," Figueroa said suddenly, breaking the silence, "can you see it up there? Where you're from?"

"No," Ratchet replied. "The core systems are not distinguishable at this distance – not even for our optics. Scintillax would be very dim even if it were."

"Thought you guys were Cybertronians," Figueroa said, frowning a little.

"We are. Scintillax is our sun. Cybertron is 'Earth' to us – even if we call its moons or the colony worlds 'home.'"

"You a colonial, doc?" The man sounded intrigued by the idea.

Ratchet shook his head. "I was brought online on Cybertron, in Iacon City. Were it not for this war, I'd be there today."

"Hard to be away from home," the former Ranger mused, shaking his head. "It's the little things, you know? I always missed the food – and the water always tasted different."

"Did it?"

"Yeah. Even after you boiled it." A pause, then: "What about you, doc? What's that one little thing you're missin'?"

Ratchet considered this a moment, then answered: "Voices." Vents cycled heavily. "I miss voices."

"You ain't heard anything from anyone else comin' our way?"

"Not yet. It's early still," Ratchet replied, then shook his head. "But that's not what I meant."

It was admittedly hard to say precisely what he meant, for it was a peculiar sort of absence that wore on him – a shot from sideways, as Bumblebee was wont to say. And he ought to know, after so long voiceless. Ratchet was sure he did – Bumblebee had never been shy, but lately, he'd been downright 'chatty'.

"Normal reaction," Ratchet had judged initially, when Optimus had mentioned it in a moment of concern. "He'll settle down eventually."

'Eventually', however, had yet to arrive, though it was four months since Mission City.

"You sure he's not glitched, doc?" Ironhide had demanded at one point.

"He does have to keep quiet for much of the day, if he's to stay with Sam and keep his cover," Ratchet had rationalized.

"I don't know," Ironhide had said skeptically, shaking his head as if to clear it of the flood of words he had just endured while helping Bumblebee assemble his wind-trap generators. "I'm beginning to think I'm working with Bluestreak!"

"He's been out here alone and incommunicado for four years, Ironhide," Ratchet had reminded him. At that,the weapons specialist had grunted, conceding the point, and then, as was his way, let it drop. As explanations went, it made good sense, after all.

But good sense might exclude the truth, even if there was nothing untrue in it. It was true that on a long solo mission to desolate reaches of space or among non-Cybertronians, one began to miss even the minimal greetings and formal, brief exchanges that signaled a change of shift. One began talking to oneself, if one could, just to hear someone's voice. Absent atmosphere, one started framing one's world in words – the HUD became a permanent part of one's vision for months and years on end. Ratchet had been a field medic too long not to recognize the signs.

And so he knew, too, that 'this' – whatever 'this' was – was something other than what the literature described. It had taken him awhile, however, to be able to say what 'this' was, this 'something other.'

There had been little clues here and there, fortunately, things that almost went unnoticed, and probably would have passed unremarked in an ordinary day, except that he was looking for that something-he-knew-not-what to which they belonged. Like Bumblebee's wordiness, or the tendency they all had, with the possible exception of Bumblebee, to over-stress tones.

"It's not, like, an accent," Mikaela had tried explaining to him once. "Not quite. It's just weird that you can copy human voices and play them back, but your own voices don't really sound like that. They sound… I dunno, sort of computerish, or like you're trying too hard."

"'Trying too hard'?" Ratchet had repeated.

"You know – just overdoing it." And when that clearly hadn't proved enlightening, she had shrugged helplessly and said, "Don't take this the wrong way, but it's a little like you're stereotyped – like you're imitating somebody, but you're overdoing it."

That actually had made some sense, for by then, Ratchet had had a few months of listening to human speech in several contexts, and he began to see – or rather, hear – what Mikaela had meant. Or so he thought, and thought, too, that he knew now why she understood it as a question of computerized voices versus 'natural' voices.

The human language that shared the most features with Cybertronian, Bumblebee had said once, in one of those many idle conversations that slid all over the conceptual map, was Chinese. Not only did its writing system allow, as Cybertronian glyphs did, for representation that followed a logic of contiguity and juxtaposition, but tonal variation and pitch were formally recognized as determinative of meaning.

There were differences, of course. Apparently, rhythm and timing were not as important to it as they were to Cybertronian, and human vocal cords did not possess the capacity to generate distinct polyphonic harmonies – this meant there could be no interaction between tonal registers. But it took fuller advantage, in Bumblebee's opinion, of vocal possibility than did English.

That certainly fit with the immediate impression Ratchet had had of human speech, namely that it was so _flat_, so very monotone even at its most fervent pitch. The words floated in a comparatively toneless voice; they didn't vibrate, didn't resound. Not much, at least, but despite that, the Autobots had held themselves to what seemed an acceptable vocal range and emphasis.

Mikaela had recognized the artifice, but had not understood its source – it was an accent, in the sense of an emphasis, an only half-conscious effort to put some of what seemed missing back into speech. Unfortunately, there was no imitating art – there was only artistry or its failure, and the rhetorical flare of Optimus in his native language did not at all come across in English. Flat and lifeless to Cybertronians, to humans, the emphasis and intonation were forced and overdone, Ratchet thought, listening with a newly sensitive ear to his friends.

But it was not so simple a thing to undo – they could imitate accents and other voices, especially if they ran them through radio equipment dedicated to such reproductions. But to speak was not simply to imitate, and Ratchet found himself hearing his own voice differently. He had heard it all along, of course, whenever he spoke with human beings, had unconsciously reacted, but now he knew what he was hearing. Or what he was not hearing. There was a hollowness, a certain emptiness that echoed in the effort to restrain himself, and all the more so when restraint compromised with human voicing. One knew the timbre of one's own voice, its peculiar resonance within one's own mind, and he did not sound himself on Earth, save when he and the others spoke amongst themselves.

No wonder Bumblebee chattered. No wonder _Ratchet_ was swearing more often, even given his own legendary predilection toward creative profanity.

"That was, like, a full two minutes, Ratchet," Mikaela would say, having taken to timing him whenever they worked together.

"It was fragging worth it!" he would defend himself. Mikaela would cock her head, a puzzled half-smile playing about her mouth, and before she could make an issue of his favorite 'English' swear words, he would add: "Look, it just doesn't all translate, all right?"

And it didn't, but that wasn't even the point. Bumblebee and Ironhide would wince sometimes and other times they would laugh when they heard him – it didn't matter. It wasn't what he said – any word could be a pejorative, he'd discovered, if he put enough into it – it was the _saying _and the _sounding_ of it. He couldn't say his own name when introducing himself, but he could damn well take it in vain for all it was worth in a moment of frustration.

Headlights flashed in the low light just then, and Ratchet blinked, then lifted his chin, flashed his lights once in response.

"They're back," he said unnecessarily, for Figueroa had already spun himself about to watch as doors opened on the Camaro and Topkick, and Lennox, Epps, and the cybernetics team spilled out, the members of the latter chattering excitedly about reaction speed readings and subroutine algorithms. Ironhide and Bumblebee waited a moment for them to move safely out of the way, then transformed – a little stiffly and slowly, Ratchet could not but note.

"Had a good time?" he inquired of the pair, casting a critical optic over them.

"You know it," Ironhide replied, sounding immensely satisfied as he dug fingers under a fairly nasty dent and pressed until the metal popped more or less back into place. He growled, and Figueroa winced a bit as if in sympathetic reaction.

"_Madre de Dios_," he murmured, and swore softly in Spanish, eying the badly scratched paint and warped metal the two Autobots were sporting with no little awe.

"Hey man," Lennox called by way of greeting. "How many times we gotta say it? English!" he teased, grinning at his former subordinate.

Figueroa rolled his eyes and gave a long-suffering sigh. "Yeah,_ claro, capitán!_" he called back. But then: "English," he muttered; "Always fucking English!"

Ratchet gave the man a nonplussed look, then canted an optical ridge as he replied, with feeling:

"_Nunca mejor dicho!_"

* * *

**Author's Notes**: Disclaimer + humble apologies: Even though I really have no excuse given where I grew up, I don't speak Spanish. All pathetic attempts to give poor Figueroa a chance to speak his own language and to let Ratchet reply come to you courtesy of the following sites.

cogweb dot ucla dot edu slash Discourse slash Proverbs slash Spanish-English dot html - my source for Figueroa's "Mas se perdio en Cuba."

forum dot wordreference dot com slash showthread dot php?t159459 – my source for Ratchet's final line: "Couldn't have said it better myself!"

Thanks to reader I-love-me-some-leggypoo for correcting "Madre del Dios" to "Madre de Dios."

I know that in the movie novelization, Figueroa dies, but it didn't happen on screen and there are no other film references to him after he gets med-evaced, so until I see his name in lights on a headstone, I'll use him!

I am sure I don't need to cite "I'm a doctor, not a (fill in the blank)."


	4. Placed

**Placed**

Autumn was generally agreed to be Tranquility's best season. Bright, but not hot; windy, but not chill, and with clear skies as far as the eye could see.

That day, the sky hung broad and brilliant overhead, without a hint of the clouds that one day soon would roll in to cover the city for months on end. It was a perfect Saturday to go for a drive, in other words.

Always provided one could find a car willing to give a lift, that is.

Sam Witwicky supposed he should be glad he no longer worried about his car getting stolen, but then again, a car with a mind of its own could get into a great deal more trouble than that. It could also decide it didn't care to hit the roads, and while Bumblebee was generally game for an hour's aimless cruise, willingness was worthless if Sam couldn't find him.

Which he couldn't.

He couldn't find _anyone_. Peering hesitantly into Ratchet's domain in hangar D, he found it immaculate, as always, and empty. No patients and, oddly, no medic, either. He didn't see Prime anywhere, and while that was not so unusual – Prime being often between the Autobots' base and various government centers – he had been about earlier. Now, he had apparently disappeared, which was a neat trick for a nearly thirty foot tall robot. Hangar A, which served as living space for everyone, was abandoned. No one seemed to be on com duty. There was no sign of Ironhide on base, nor explosions or gunfire coming from "the range". As for a certain Camaro – gone. No Bumblebee to be seen.

Sam stood in the middle of the base and frowned. When he'd sequestered himself in Hangar E to get that last, nagging history assignment done for the week, he'd assumed someone would still be about when he got back. But even Mikaela was gone. Probably, she was with Ratchet... wherever he might be. He shook his head. Where was everyone?

"Ok, is this a joke?" he called at length. "Because it's great and all – very funny! – but don't feel obligated on my behalf or anything! Seriously!" A beat. "Hello?"

When no replies were forthcoming, Sam sighed and fished his phone out of his hip pocket. Quickly, he scrolled through his address book, selected the first name on the list, and texted a message: _where are you? _

A minute later, the answer came back: _Ridge below the base – two miles north_.

Sam glanced at the cliff that overlooked Tranquility, then squinted up at the sun. Ok, west was left, so... He began walking, then paused to yank his phone free once more when it signaled another incoming message:

_Watch your step. _

"Watch my step," Sam repeated to himself and raised his brows, skeptically. "Ooh-kay, then. Watching my step. Right."

Perhaps twenty minutes later, he understood the warning. Despite having been a regular visitor to the Autobots' base since June, he still hadn't seen everything and the north side of the base was one of those hitherto unseen things. Quite possibly this was due to the rather steep and rocky incline that led down to a lower level plateau, and as Sam scrambled down it, he couldn't help but wonder if someone like Ironhide could even scale something like this. He found he had trouble envisioning _any_ of the Autobots managing it, actually, but apparently at least one of them could.

That one was lying on his stomach, chin propped in his hands as he looked out over the north-side cliff-face. Sam approached quietly, only to be greeted when he was still a good thirty feet away.

"Hello, Sam," Bumblebee said, without so much as a glance over his shoulder.

"Hey, 'Bee," Sam replied, then shook his head. "So what's up? Where are the others?"

"What's up is a very nice day – one of the last ones, Mikaela said, before winter and rain become the norm," Bumblebee replied as Sam came and plopped himself down beside him. "As for the others – Ironhide is parked pretty deep in the range, and Ratchet, Prime, and Mikaela are on the southern ridge, on Spyglass Hill."

Sam frowned. "What's with the mass exodus? I thought someone was supposed to be on duty all the time?"

"I'm tapped into the main com line and sensor net," Bumblebee replied. "But it's too nice a day not to get a little sun while we can. Ratchet and Mikaela even ganged up on Prime and threatened to take a crowbar to him if he wouldn't join them."

"Huh. Ok. Got it." Sam grinned. "You all ditched to go sunbathing, basically."

"Basically."

"And you left me because...?"

"If we'd called you when we left, you wouldn't have finished your homework," Bumblebee finished smoothly. "Besides, I knew you'd phone once you realized we were gone. And here you are."

"True," Sam replied, as he laced his fingers behind his head and stretched out on his back beside his friend. It really was a nice day for fall, he thought, squinting up at the sun whitening the sky. Then he glanced over at Bumblebee. The Autobot appeared quite content to watch the city below, his panels relaxed but angled slightly to take full advantage of the sunlight, like some giant, metallic heliotrope.

"We can convert solar energy into usable power," Ratchet had explained early on. "It's not as quick as using energon, but it isn't as damaging or as expensive as using hydrocarbons."

"And it's less disgusting," Ironhide had been quick to add.

"That, too," Ratchet had agreed. Bumblebee had shaken his head.

"They're not that bad. But solar power burns a lot cleaner. Besides," he had said, eyes brightening with amusement, "who wouldn't want to lie in the sun?"

_No one here, clearly! _Sam thought, as he shut his eyes and watched the dazzle spots dance on the back of his eyelids. He blew out a snort of laughter. It was funny, but somehow, he'd never imagined that in between efforts to save the world, a species of advanced robotic aliens would give the "sun sluts", as Miles called the kids constantly chasing a tan, a run for their money. And who knew? Maybe also for delinquency. "So," he said, "you're on call and you've got all this great sun – ever fallen asleep on duty?"

"No, why?"

"Just thinkin' – a little sun, a little snooze..."

"Maybe for you. All this nice EMR teeks way too high for that."

_The what does huh? _Sam's brow knit, as he demanded: "Say what?"

"Sunlight – teeks way too high."

"That's what I thought you said." Sam let his head loll toward his friend and cracked his eyes open. "So what's this word 'teeking' I've never heard of before?"

Bumblebee's motor gave a low whir. "It's... hard to explain," he said after a moment.

* * *

Bumblebee had seen many an alien world, and he had spent four years on Earth among human beings. While admittedly, he had had a fairly daunting task to perform, which left little time for idle curiosity, he had, as a matter of course, absorbed sufficient of the culture in which he found himself to have noticed certain patterns of behavior and of speech. These in turn had fostered the impression that human beings most likely had five senses – possibly six. But he had had no time to bother with extensive research on something so far afield from his duties; only lately had things stabilized enough to pursue such hypothetical questions. And as with all things he undertook, he had delved in eagerly – he had his reasons, after all.

Ratchet had merely canted an optical ridge at him when he had explained his inquiry and his interest, then shrugged and begun looking through what medical files he could find online. Between the two of them, the count of human senses had swiftly been pinned at five... almost. At the very least, there was nothing to suggest that that hypothetical sixth sense didn't manifest in ways quite like the other well-established five – visually, or tactilely, or as voices, occasionally as a smell, even more rarely as a taste (though these last two, Bumblebee judged from the style of the few reports, might be metaphorical).

Whatever the status of such claims, the important point was that as far as Ratchet or Bumblebee could tell, this alleged 'sixth sense' had nothing to do with sensing the electromagnetic spectrum beyond the visual or infrared ranges.

"If there is a human sixth sense, it is possible it might be operationally related to the EM spectrum in some way," Ratchet had theorized, as he and Bumblebee had discussed the results and implications of their search. "Some unknown variation on what they call 'spooky action at a distance', perhaps."

"Doesn't much help us, though," Bumblebee had pointed out. "Even if they really don't have the receptors for EMR, we'll still need a word. C'mon, Ratch – how would you say it? You've got twenty-six letters and up to fifty phonemes to work with, here."

Ratchet had thought a long moment. "_T!xliiiilieek!xt_?" he had suggested finally, in fine, full-throated Cybertronian tones.

Bumblebee's vents had flared. "You're missing the point," he had told his friend. "If you invent a human word, it needs to be something human beings could say. And it's not very English, even so."

"If it's English you want, try Optimus," had been Ratchet's pointed reply.

He had tried everyone, in fact, but they had all found themselves stumped, as humans would say. Ironhide had followed Ratchet in trying to (re)produce a word close to their own; Optimus had suggested translating it into tactile terms. Bumblebee dearly wished Jazz were present to offer an opinion, their late first lieutenant and special ops officer having always had a head for languages. Probably he would have suggested using sound-words, given that he _was_ Jazz. Or had been. It was still hard to think of him in permanent past tense.

After considering his limited options, Bumblebee had finally come up with "teek" – a much shortened, "snappier" (and so more Anglophone) word that could serve as a noun and as a verb, and which at least retained something of its origins.

Not that sounding English was getting him anywhere at the moment.

"You mean it's actually really different from seeing or feeling or hearing?" Sam said finally, brow furrowed as he tried to process the explanation.

"Yes," Bumblebee replied.

"Okaaay." Sam's eyes narrowed as he considered the matter a moment. Then: "Like... _how_?"

How indeed? Sensitive sensor panels flexed slightly as he shrugged, and the sunlight 'teeked' pleasantly across them. "It just _is_," he replied, and fell disappointedly silent. Not that he mightn't have expected this, of course - he'd had plenty of warning.

"What's the point, 'Bee?" Ironhide had asked him, after several unsuccessful attempts to satisfy Bumblebee's requests for help in creating a word. "They won't get it. They don't need to; we're the only ones on this planet who need a word for this, and we've got one already."

He was right, naturally. Looked at from a human perspective, it was not humanity that lacked a sense, it was Cybertronians who had an extra one, which was why everyone resorted to "Sensors indicate..." whenever it was necessary to talk about things sensed through EMR receptors. It was not as if it were impossible to speak in such terms – Cybertronians did it all the time whenever they needed to say something about the things perceived, which was naturally quite often.

What dropped out, however, was the sensing itself – the feeling of the thing. And human beings literally did not know what they were missing. Some days, when frustrations ran high, Bumblebee was convinced his friends didn't know either – and perhaps to a degree, that was true. Not every Cybertronian had Bumblebee's specialized sensor panels – they didn't need them any more than humans did.

But there wasn't a 'bot in the universe who didn't have EMR sensors. They wouldn't know each other without them – when form and so voice, too, were so fluid, it was that unique 'teek' of spark and energy flow that anchored a name, or that could give the lie to a false one unless a 'bot were specially equipped to distort his 'signature'. Nor was that the only use to which such sensors were put, naturally. Everything 'teeked', with few exceptions. The universe was one vast field of EM radiation, woven around scattered matter, and it was always there, a vibrant sort of pulse that lit things up, in a manner of speaking. Or it was a vast sound box in which everything resonated in a complicated, shifting pattern. Or it was touch – a feeling of the whole world on the surface of one's skin.

It could be any and all of those things, if one had to resort to metaphor. Or one could just say it all _teeked_. And for all the shifting dynamism of it, there wasn't a 'bot who wouldn't know what Bumblebee meant when he said it gave him _place_. It kept him centered. "Lost" was something he had never truly felt, save in the aftermath of Tyger Pax, when, voiceless and badly wounded, his panels shredded, he had wandered dazedly through the ruins, intent upon keeping moving in the vague, half-delirious hope that he might find a way out from behind enemy lines. At the least, he would not simply wait for the Decepticons to find him again. The world had seemed very dim and thin then, and he'd been seized by the totally irrational terror that things were moving without his knowing it – that he might step forward and fall over a bit of sky where there should have been earth, or perhaps he would turn around and find himself on a moon. Maybe upside down. Or maybe the reason it had seemed he had been going in circles was because the land was moving with him when he couldn't 'teek' it.

Every effort to use his sensors, however, had only brought blinding agony, and so he had had to settle for a world in pieces, just so as to have one at all.

Hoover Dam had brought those memories back with a vengeance. His captors hadn't known enough to be truly vicious in the time they had had him, for which he was grateful, but that didn't spare him the days when panels just throbbed – no reason for it, but that bodies had their own memories that the cool visions of the mind did nothing to right or repress. Five months later and the nights were still bad sometimes, and he was dreading the prospect of rain, which only hurt the more because usually, he found rain pleasant. He liked its 'teek'.

Yet darkness brought the memories back, and so more than ever, he craved the sun, and not just to chase the sluggishness of low energy levels away. Sunlight burned away all such fears, was better even than rain down his back. It was a rare constant, between Earth and Cybertron, and oh, but he missed the cities! Living cities, alive with energy, and home to so many whose sparks 'lit up' even the night, teeked so strongly and clearly! Earth had nothing like them – it was 'softer', a more 'muted' world, though some days, when he did ache from memory, he appreciated that. It might not be home, but it was haven.

But today was a good day. The sun's warmth was pleasant, as was the sense of energy racing under the surface of his skin, and he lifted his panels toward those steadying rays. This felt _good_, and Primus willing, it would tomorrow, too. Days like these were what made him want for words – who wouldn't want to share such glorious days with a friend? And so he gamely said on, trying first one way, then another, to convey what it was that he felt so vividly, while his young friend struggled to understand.

"So, I'm still not sure I get it," Sam said finally, still quite evidently puzzled. "What exactly does this word mean?"

Bumblebee considered this a long moment, and he flexed his panels a little, enjoying the way Sam's signature – close and 'heavy,' and so 'bright' for a human being – slid across their surface. Steady as sunlight, that was Sam, as he lay there idly tracing patterns in the dust with his fingers – and Primus, but Bumblebee had been needing that lately!

Which was, perhaps, why he replied at length, and despite his thoughts of a few moments ago: "It means that this is home now, and that I'm staying – and that there's got to be some radar operator _somewhere_ on this planet who needs to say how birds feel to his array!"

Sam stared at him a moment, but then he chuckled, staring up at the sky. "Well," he said, turning his head towards Bumblebee, "I guess _teek_'s got as good a chance of getting into a dictionary as _super-cali-fragilistic-ex-piali-docious_! And everybody knows what that means!" Sam paused, and when Bumblebee said nothing, asked, "You _do_ know what that means, right?"

A few moments' searching the internet yielded an answer. "It doesn't mean anything!"

"Exactly. And if we all know _that_, then_ teek_'s got a fighting chance, I'd say."

"That's comforting," Bumblebee said, then canted an optical ridge. "I think."

"No problem. 'S what friends're for, right?"

At that, Bumblebee did laugh softly, engine purring smoothly. "So they are. Thank you, Sam."

Sam gave a lazy, contented smile. "Don't mention it." A pause. "Glad you're here, 'Bee."

Eyes glowing, Bumblebee looked from his young friend to the city below, feeling its alien 'pulse' along his panels, as he replied quietly, "So am I, Sam. So am I!"

* * *

**Author's Notes:** I know the general plot points for Bumblebee at Tyger Pax, but I confess I haven't read the graphic novels, so all this is undoubtedly AU where his history is concerned. It was just too good an episode to pass on, however, in the effort to write in an electromagnetic 'sixth sense.'

**Note II**: _super-cali-fragilistic-ex-piali-docious: _For whatever reason, the word as normally spelled gets stripped out by FFN of late. I have been told to change the word, but since other nonsense words lack the iconic status of the Mary Poppins term, I've elected to try hyphenating it instead. _  
_


	5. Electric Sheep

**Author's Note August 2008**: If you're looking for the new chapter, it's chapter 1. Sorry for the confusion!

**Electric Sheep**

From twenty miles up, Cybertron in its glory days was alive with light. Cities glittered coldly against its dark surface, merging at the rim of the world with Scintillax's brilliance. Every day, for uncounted years, he'd come online every shift to that sight and had loved it. He had never tired of it, had never looked to, had certainly never thought he would ever have reason to miss it.

It had been well over ten millennia since Optimus had last looked on Cybertron from that beloved orbital perch – back when he had still been Optronix. And the last time he'd seen his homeworld, it had lost its brilliance, gone dark with the dust and destruction of war. Only in rare dreams did he revisit those long ago dawns, Cybertron rising serenely into his view, but it was not the same. Things were fluid in dreams – they did not keep their shape or order. And there were voices in the void, as there never had been in life.

"The moons are lovely tonight," Sentinel Prime said. Optimus, drifting at an angle to him, looked a moment, then replied:

"They're going to fall."

And from somewhere above him, Prime Nova blinkered amusement at him. "They always were," he retorted. "But if you turn with them, you won't notice. Look."

Optimus looked, and the world had gone dark – _all_ light had gone out, save the stars far beyond Cybertron... and the sparks of Nova and Sentinel, that glimmered and pulsed in the silent speech of the airless dockyards. _Time to come home: where we are, there it becomes. And so shall they all._

* * *

It was a grey day in February when a flame-painted semi pulled to a stop on a little-used emergency access road that ran alongside the banks of the Klamath river. The engine died, and for a few moments, it sat parked there, unmoving. But when it was clear that there was no one else about, a shudder ran through the frame, and then in a flurry of motion, the truck unfolded into the commander of the Autobots. Optimus Prime took one last look about, sensors reaching out beyond what vision could show, confirming what he knew already: that he was alone. It was habit, that last look, beaten in by too many years dealing in Decepticon cloaking fields that could fool the first scan and even the second.

Assured he need not worry about either Decepticon snipers or stray hikers, Optimus turned toward the river, sinking down on his haunches and leaning his forearms on his knees as he watched it run through its channel. Ever since November, rain had become a familiar occurrence, and he knew he would likely hear from Ratchet about mud caught in his undercarriage, but after so long an association, such rants inspired amusement as much as caution. Affectionate amusement, to be sure, which nevertheless was not going to stop him from coming out to the river, whether or not his alt-mode was made for off-roading or the access road built to accommodate a vehicle his size.

Especially now, with the water running high and quick – Cybertron, indeed, most Cybertronian worlds, had nothing like it and amid fascination, Optimus had found the rush of the waters strangely calming. It helped him order his thoughts to come and watch the river, even if he often didn't feel comfortable leaving his alt-mode. For all that he looked forward to the day when 'discretion' in the face of still rather frightened and confused human beings did not mean retaining one's disguise when around the majority of their human hosts, he had to admit that for the moment, both Autobots and human beings found it easier to minimize confrontations. That would have to change one day, and soon, and that was one of the things he often came out here to think about. But today, he had other matters on his mind.

They'd been coming more often – the dreams, and within the dreams, 'the others'. Shortly after Optronix had become Optimus Prime, Flicksaw, who had been CMO to his predecessor and the 'bot who had been with Sentinel Prime longer than any other, had drawn him aside and warned him about the dreams... and the 'ghosts' of Primes past who figured in them.

"You're one with them now, Optimus, and they are one with you," the medic had said. "That is a part of what the Matrix, and its link to the Allspark, does, though we do not know how it works. That is why you are no longer Optronix. You may remember things that never happened to Optronix, but which happened nonetheless to you, and which can aid you in time of need. And you will dream – and sometimes, you'll find the others there."

It had all seemed rather cryptic at the time, but over the course of years, he'd come to understand better what Flicksaw had been clearly struggling to tell him. He couldn't blame his late CMO for his vagueness – everything Flicksaw knew of such matters he had gleaned from Sentinel and from the restricted-access medical files on Primes that he, as the medic assigned to a Prime, had been privy to. He'd never experienced another personality as somehow 'his own'; and like all other Cybertronians, Flicksaw had never dreamt. Only Primes were able to do so. But since the Matrix, and its peculiar effects, generally only passed to a new 'bot upon the death of the previous bearer, the duty of helping the new Prime adjust to and understand his rather singular situation fell to the medical corps, and Flicksaw had been nothing if not conscientious.

Unfortunately, there was nothing in any medical record to help Optimus in his present straits, and even 'his' long experience of the Matrix, going back to the first bearer, held no answers. The Matrix had never before existed without the Allspark, after all.

"I've read everything the medical archives had on the Matrix," Ratchet had said, when first Prime had brought the matter up with him, shortly after Mission City. "No one has ever been able to explain the precise nature of its connection to the Allspark, or of a Prime's relation to both or either of them. We just know there is a link and that certain effects are to be expected in the one who takes up the Matrix."

"So you haven't any idea whether an increase in dreams might be related to the loss of the Allspark?"

Ratchet had spread his hands helplessly. "I'm afraid not. Most of what the medical community knows about the interaction of the Allspark with the Matrix and its bearer comes from direct testimony – I couldn't begin to extrapolate the implications of the Allspark's destruction. You're in a better position than I am to say what those consequences are. I trust, sir," his CMO had added, without his customary threatening edge, "that you know to come to me with any such consequences."

"I know," Optimus had assured him. "And I will."

"It will be my duty, after all, to pass on what little we have left to whoever succeeds me," Ratchet had continued quietly. "And I need to know in any case – I'm your medic and you're in my care."

Optimus had known Ratchet quite long enough to know what the rare, sincere formality meant. Thus: "I'll keep you apprised," he had promised. And then, after a slight pause: "Thank you, Ratchet."

After all their years together, that sufficed for friendship's sake. So Ratchet knew that he'd been having more dreams, and that more often than not, 'the others' – _his_ others, closer to him than he was to himself, paradoxically – seemed to appear in them and to speak. Not that either he or Ratchet had any notion of whether these occurrences meant anything. The art of interpreting dreams was not one Cybertronians possessed. Optimus couldn't help but think they had to mean something, but self-reflection wasn't yielding much.

Only he found himself seized by a strange sense of anticipation – not anxiety, per se, but he felt vaguely as though, with the advent of these more frequent, 'vivid' dreams, that he was waiting for something.

"There's a lot to wait for," Ratchet had suggested, when he'd mentioned it. "The day when we don't have to be quite as discreet about our presence here, the day we get a signal from someone new..."

"No, it's something else," Optimus had insisted.

"But what, then?"

"I don't know," he'd replied. "But I know I'm waiting." Waiting for some event he knew not what, some sign to declare itself –_something_.

Perhaps he was waiting for something to fill the void he'd been feeling since May – the void they'd all been feeling, if only as an undercurrent of unease, a sense of silence or darkness that went beyond the strangeness of this world, which lacked so many of the familiar signposts by which Cybertronians oriented themselves when at home. Things seemed a little thinner, more precarious – and it was not simply, Optimus thought, a reaction to the knowledge that any new death brought them all a step closer to extinction.

All Cybertronians had been sparked from a single source and they bore the mark of that common origin, across every difference. One could feel it. It was subtle, but even one's bitterest enemy teeked a certain, self-same way that forced the recognition, at the very agonizing limits of even the Cybertronian word: _You are my brother._ Optimus, reading up on humanity's long and varied theorizing on dreams, had encountered a phrase in one source that had struck him as startlingly apt: _imago dei_, in which, so ran the claim, human fraternity was founded. It wasn't quite the same thing, but the idea had a certain resonance, if only by analogy. But where everything was analogy, one welcomed a good one.

The destruction of the Allspark had not unmade that mark, but in feeling that 'imprint', one felt also that something had gone out of the universe. One felt that it was _only_ a mark now, not a trace or a trail – it no longer led one beyond the 'bot one faced. They were all as isolated beacons now who stood no more in a certain light, but only in its absence.

Overhead, thunder rumbled softly. Optimus's vents flared gently as the rain began to come down – a scattering of drops that raised little dust clouds on the riverbank, and _plinked! _as they struck his armor. He probably ought to take that as a sign to return to base or at least shift to his alt-mode – it would certainly make Ratchet look more kindly upon him when he arrived back home – but he was not quite ready to depart.

_And a little rainwater in my gears will give Ratchet something to rant about_, Optimus thought, smiling a little at his CMO's imagined reaction should he tell him so. But the smile faded after a few moments as the river, roiling now with the new rain, drew his gaze once more. They had been like that, once – all of them lit up in a vaster light, as the little rain showed only on the surface of the greater river. Once, Cybertronians had called each other 'brother' and understood that all were one; the war had brought with it change, so that 'bots said now, "Until all are one," and meant it as a hope for the future. Optimus had always thought it a promise – that there would be a reconciliation one day and a healing of the rift that had created Autobots and Decepticons.

He still believed – _had_ to believe –that that was possible, but since Mission City, it had dawned slowly upon him that there might be more to that notion of 'oneness' than a society at peace. That perhaps even if Autobots and Decepticons did, in the next millennium, give up their emblems to go on together as one people again, they would still be restless – yearning for a unity that could not now be regained. If once Cybertronians had been as the rain on the river, now they were raindrops in an empty channel, under a dessicated sky.

And somehow, the dreams were connected to this change – he was convinced of it. Optimus could offer no objective support for that conviction, yet intuition would brook no refusals, no denials. But he could make no headway against its opacity, nor see where it led. Lately, it seemed there were many such dead ends – thoughts trailing off into a nothingness without issue. As if thought traced the fractured contours of a wound, the ragged lines of a cut that had amputated the future, showing up the loose ends. And what were they to do with such?

_What we always do_, he thought. _Find ground._ Which was easier said than done – another loose end in itself. Where did one ground oneself now, when simple sensibility testified to the absence of their most fundamental support? In light of that, even the most mundane of actions no longer had the same meaning, but none of them were certain where to look for a new one.

That uncertainty was wearing – he could see it in the faces of his little cohort. Things didn't make much sense anymore. Oh, there were things to do, duties to fulfill, projects to work on, and everyone went about doing them, but to what end? And though no one said it aloud, he knew where they looked for an answer to that question.

Unfortunately, Optimus didn't have one to give. Being Prime hadn't granted him an immunity to the effects of their loss: he was mired right along with them, spinning his wheels so as to have the feeling, if not the fact, of movement. Being Prime only gave a further, finer edge to the pain loss inflicted.

A Prime, after all, was in some ways nothing but a circuit between the Allspark, the living, and the dead. He didn't simply _bear_ 'the Matrix,' he _was_ the Matrix in which they all came together, in which the past, present, and future coexisted. Put a bar on the future, and the circuit was not simply broken, it was unmade. 'Prime' was a name now, without the substance it had had once, nor could it ever be more than a name again: after him, there wouldn't _be _another Prime. There couldn't be, not the way Optimus and all his predecessors had been. He could pass the Matrix on, but it would at best function as an archive – a file for dead memory. In the absence of the Allspark, it could not create another, living matrix – it could not create a new Prime.

He hadn't shared that with anyone yet, not even Ratchet, which did nothing to ease his conscience. Optimus's vents flared heavily. Poor Ratchet, concerned to keep a record of these times for his successor, was keeping logs for an impossibility! Always assuming, of course, that his CMO, who could be accused of many things but never of being slow-witted, hadn't reasoned matters out to the same conclusion Optimus had come to, and chosen likewise to say nothing. For whether or not there could be a Prime now that the Allspark was destroyed, the Autobots still looked to Optimus to act as their Prime.

On his worst days, that expectation made Optimus want to shake them, to make them see what he was seeing – to 'wake them up', as humans were so fond of saying. Those were the days when _everything_ seemed made to get in his gears and grind them, and he couldn't wait to shut down and leave the world to spin its own way without him, even if it flew right off its axis. Let the others handle matters for once and leave him be! It was not as if he had any peculiar right to such authority any longer, or any answers!

Which wasn't fair – as much as he'd asked of his Autobots, and especially of 'his four', as he'd come to think of them, they had yet to refuse him. Not even when he asked too much. He had no cause to complain of them for asking him to play his part, and in fact, he was immensely proud of them. Yes, they struggled, and they suffered, and complained and broke down on occasion over grief and frustration. But they'd stood by each other with a will the entire while, and despite all odds, despite the radical uncertainty of their or anyone's future, they were making a home for themselves here, on this world that in so many ways didn't have room for them. If a part of what enabled them to respond as magnificently as they had to their straits was that Optimus continue the fiction of Primacy, could he really deny them that? Could he ask them to give up the unique trust they gave him?

Sensors teeked just then, and Optimus grunted as he recognized a familiar presence. He didn't move, however, not even when, some five minutes later, Ironhide pulled to a halt a little ways distant. He sat there in Topkick mode for another minute or two before, with a clearly pained growl of engine, he transformed and squelched down the road to stand, dripping, over his commander.

"Good afternoon, Ironhide," Optimus said mildly, ignoring both the run-off from Ironhide's armor and also his weapons specialist's disgruntled expression.

"Evening, actually," Ironhide corrected. "Do I want to ask what you're doing out here?"

Optimus wiped absently at a wet shoulder-guard onto which his friend was dripping, and replied, "Just thinking." But he did raise his optics to Ironhide's face, considering the other a moment, before asking: "Have you something to report? What brings you?" For Ironhide ought to have just come online to com duty about an hour ago, which meant he could have simply called Optimus in to handle any trouble. He needn't have come down from the base... unless there were some problem with the comlines. Like a jamming field, perhaps, but Optimus hadn't detected any such interference. Likely, therefore, there was nothing pressing to speak of, but then why had Ironhide left his post to come tail his commander to this out of the way place, and in this weather?

"Ratchet sent me to look for you," Ironhide replied, and an antenna rotated slightly, flicking back eastward. "He's on station right now."

"Is something the matter, then?" Optimus asked, rising at last to face the other.

"Well, that's the thing," Ironhide temporized, scowling fiercely, and his commander canted an optical ridge. Was Ironhide... embarrassed?

"What is?" he prompted, after a few moments' silence.

"Ratchet wants you back on base, but he also said I should bring you in because you might have something to say about this glitch I've been having the past couple weeks," the other confessed.

And: _Ah_, Optimus thought, sagely. So this had to do with some sort of difficulty on Ironhide's part. That explained much – especially if he'd been hiding it from Ratchet for two weeks, it must be something his weapons specialist considered either minor or else somehow 'beneath' him, as if ailments were subject to such distinctions!

_And I suppose I've been subject to it at some point, or why else would Ratchet send Ironhide to me? _he reasoned. Although frankly, he was still surprised Ratchet had let Ironhide out of his lair at all. He ought still to be ranting at him for letting it slide for two weeks instead of reporting it immediately...

Or perhaps Ratchet had simply decided he needed to put a safe distance between himself and Ironhide before he took an arc-welder to the weapons specialist to convince him to talk. For Ironhide seemed quite content to have report of this glitch dragged out of him, one question at a time to judge by his present silence. So Optimus gave a soft, warning growl of his engine – _Talk! Don't make me force you! _

With a discontented churn of his own motor, Ironhide obeyed. "It's nothing dangerous, just... odd. Been remembering these jumbled image and word sequences. Not patchy or disordered like when you try to remember something that's getting defragged – this stuff doesn't even make sense. Well, no," he backtracked a bit, "it makes a sort of sense sometimes, but not a lot. It's like listening to one of those infernal sound-poems Jazz always liked – you know the ones." He shrugged. "It's mostly junk memories – unimportant stuff – all pieced together strangely, even though they don't belong together. Thought at first I must be picking up signal bleed from someone else or a satellite, but then I started recognizing some of it as mine.

"Anyhow," Ironhide concluded, just a touch irritably, vents flaring out as he gave himself a shake, dashing rainwater from the crevices of armor, "Ratchet says there's nothing wrong with me, but he was pretty insistent I go find you and tell you about it. Said you'd 'know better' than him, which I figure is a first for him."

"I imagine you're right," Optimus murmured, though mentally, he was reeling a bit. Ironhide grunted, eying him closely.

"So," he asked bluntly, folding his arms just under his chassis, "do you know what to make of this?"

"On what occasions did you say these memories came to you?" Optimus asked.

"I didn't. But I've been coming online to them. Strange thing is, I remember them _then_, but I remember them as happening _earlier_," Ironhide said, just a bit evasively.

"When, precisely?" he pressed.

"Well, _I_ remember them as happening during recharge," Ironhide replied, stressing the pronoun just a bit. "But that's impossible, so I don't know why I've got that impression."

If Ironhide had been hoping for an explanation of recent strange experience, he was sorely disappointed. These puzzling memory loops, or 'scrambles,' he supposed, had had him feeling a bit unnerved – enough so that he'd finally gone to Ratchet, despite the fact that he knew he had to sound like a psych-ward escapee. Ratchet's cryptic response and 'prescription' hadn't helped, nor was standing here in the rain, with water getting all down inside his armor to pool in his innards, and mud in his tire treads and wheel wells, doing anything to improve his mood. So when his friend and commanding officer simply stared at him, then shook himself and sat down in a rather abrupt clatter to put his head in his hands, Ironhide was not predisposed to take it well.

"Optimus?" he demanded, crouching down hurriedly, cursing the slick-chill slosh of rainwater in places it oughtn't to be. The other 'bot's frame gave a slight shudder. "What's the matter?" he asked, as Prime's engine stuttered, once and again, then choked. "I'm calling Ratchet!"

"No, don't – I'm fine!" came the tight reply, and Ironhide's optics narrowed as he realized his friend was not suffering some bizarre systems failure, but was actually_ laughing._

At that, Ironhide straightened up again, watching in consternation as Optimus just kept right on laughing fit to crack his spark-casing.

"What?" he demanded, bewildered and feeling more cross than concerned now. And: _Ratchet must've known this would happen – I'm going to kill him when I get back!_ he vowed. But not before he learned just what the joke was. "Why is this funny?"

Fortunately, Prime seemed to have gotten past it somewhat, whatever it was, for he shook himself once more before shooting Ironhide an apologetic, if still mirth-laden, look. "Forgive me, Ironhide, it isn't funny. And I'm not laughing at you," Optimus said finally. He cocked his head a bit, optics narrowing. "For that matter, I'm not entirely certain I ought to be laughing at all. I don't know where this is headed, but I simply..." He trailed off and shook his head as a couple of chuckles forced their way through. "_So shall they all_, indeed!"

Ironhide ran that through his head a few times, but to no avail. "Am I supposed to understand that?" he finally asked, not bothering to suppress the growl.

"Maybe in time. I'm not sure I understand it myself," Prime replied. Levering himself up from the ground, he laid his hands on Ironhide's shoulders, gripping tightly enough that he could feel it, and said, "But I do know that Ratchet is right: there's nothing wrong with you, Ironhide. You've just been dreaming."

_I've been _what_? _Ironhide took a good minute or two to process this before he shook his head sharply, incredulous. "You mean like _humans_?"

"Like humans and numerous other biological species, and like Primes do sometimes, yes."

"But we don't... What does this mean, then?" a confused Ironhide demanded. Optimus gave a soft rumble and fell thoughtfully silent once more. But eventually, he answered:

"I do not think that we can know what it means for the time being. But I imagine that if you can dream, so can others, and that perhaps they will begin to do so, just as you have. And I'd like to think that it might be a hopeful sign," he said.

"A sign of what?"

"That though we're on a long road, we're coming home." Optimus held his eyes a moment, letting that sink in, fantastic as it sounded, then released him, giving him a bit of a shove toward the road. "Things are changing, my friend. But for the moment, Ratchet's waiting on us. Come then," he said quietly. "Let's go!"

* * *

**Author's Notes **

December 2007: Title comes from the title of Philip K. Dick's novel, _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_

"_Time to go home. Where we are, there it becomes_." - _'Here, in the field of the dream, you are at home. Where It was, there I must become.' _- Freud, cited in Lacan, "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis."

Cybertronians do not dream: I ran across this idea when I was looking up information on Ratchet and Cybertronian anatomy for an earlier story. Find that information here:

transformers dot wikia dot com slash wiki slash Humanizing#Otherbiologicalfunctions

It's not true for all Transformer continuities, apparently, but I found it an interesting idea. Dreaming in human beings is subject to a lot of contradictory speculation – we just don't understand it, which makes it a phenomenon that is easily turned to one's own narrative purposes. So far as I know, nothing has been said either way about Cybertronians' ability or inability to dream in the movieverse continuity, and obviously, I've tweaked the idea to my own ends here by giving Primes the exclusive ability to dream.

Doing that opened the question of what a Prime is. I know there's obviously scads of information out there, but none of it quite spoke to my narrative needs. So while I've tried to avoid completely contradicting the major points established about Primes, I haven't been trying to fit neatly inside the concrete information I've got available to me.

And with that, this 'story' is officially done! Thank you for reading and commenting, everyone!


End file.
